Re-engendering “Cinderella” on Screen:
Andy Tennant’s Ever After:
A Cinderella Story
Alexandra Cheira
University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies – CEAUL / ULICES
ISSN: 0873-0628
ANGLO SAXONICA
SER. III N. 7 2014
Re-engendering “Cinderella” on Screen:
Andy Tennant’s Ever After: A Cinderella Story
T
he enchanted realm of the wonder tale has been gazed upon quite
often by novelists, short-story authors and even poets, who have
imaginatively translated into their creations their own personal
wanderings in wonderland. In the particular case of “Cinderella”, the
wonder tale I want to focus on, Anne Sexton, Roald Dahl and Emma
Donoghue can be counted among the contemporary authors who have
reread Charles Perrault’s and the Grimms’ versions by rewriting them in
poems and short stories. In so doing, “they have also stretched the tales,
giving them a modern, feminist appearance by reversing or highlighting
many of the perverse misogynistic views with which the source texts were
imbued” (Bobby 31). The wonder tale realm has also been inhabited by
literary scholars and folklorists who continue to find fresh meanings in
new readings of old tales and have, more often than not, brought critical
attention to neglected or forgotten tales by first making them available
for the public in general, thus opening more doors into Wonderland.
A case in point is Jack Zipes’s collection The Great Fairy Tale Tradition:
From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm (2001), which gathers
together the four different versions of “Cinderella” which I will presently
bring into discussion. In fact, alongside the well-known Perrault’s
“Cinderella; or, the Glass Slipper” (1697) and the Grimms’ “Cinderella”
(1857), Zipes has also collected two former, and relatively unknown,
versions: Giambattista Basile’s “The Cat Cinderella” (which was posthumously published in 1634) and Marie-Cathérine d’Aulnoy’s “Finette
Cendron” (1697). Finally, different generations of readers worldwide keep
on breathing “the wilder air of the marvellous” (Warner 3) which breaks
free from the renewed wonder of every page filled with familiar motifs that
feel nonetheless new. Thus is the old legacy of wonder(ful) tales far from
exhausted.
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The particular looking glass of literary retelling has therefore brought
to attention an interwoven path of mingled directions which converge in
a moment and go their separate ways immediately thereafter through
different literary paths which depart from an old version of a tale, itself
adapted and rewritten from several others. Thus, stories which are quite
different and cannot be imitated (because they recall each other but are
always another story) are further complicated when transposed into yet
another medium, that of cinema. Bearing in mind that, unlike written
tales, “film powerfully realizes the transcendence over reality with which
magical narrative is intrinsically concerned” (Tiffin 181), I will read four
very different wonder tale versions of “Cinderella”, on a par with Tennant’s
Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998). Following up the argument that
“the magical paradigm of fairy tale finds echoes in the magic of the film
experience even without special effects, in film’s ability to create the
apparent three-dimensionality of the real on a flat, unmoving screen,
through the trickery of light and image” (Tiffin 181), I will focus on the
gendered differences between written wonder tale versions and film, as well
as on their distinctive narrative techniques. I argue that this feminist
revision of “Cinderella” (co-authored by Tennant and a female screenwriter,
Susannah Grant) re-engenders identities by being closer to the only version
written by a woman author (Marie-Cathérine d’Aulnoy), both in narrative
style and in substance, than to any of the male versions — including the
alleged Grimm tale it follows.
Tennant’s Ever After opens with a frame narrative which firmly
writes Cinderella’s story out of the wonder tale realm and into the province
of the historical narrative. Tennant does that by changing the supposed
timeless quality of the wonder tale into a definite time and place, that of
Renaissance France (complete with historical characters such as Leonardo
da Vinci, who actually lived in France for the last three years of his life at
the service of Francis I). Interestingly enough, Tennant thus chooses the
narrative technique of embedding Cinderella’s tale in a frame story, a device
the male authors — save for Basile — did not endorse but which was
favoured by the conteuses. In fact, the aristocratic women storytellers who
gave birth to the literary fairy tale in the salons in late 17th century France
excelled in the art of drawing narrative pleasure in the often self-reflexive,
playful interaction between embedded tale and frame story. For the purpose
RE-ENGENDERING “CINDERELLA” ON SCREEN
of this essay, I would like to draw attention to the salonnière widely
acclaimed as the Queen of Fairies, Marie-Cathérine d’Aulnoy herself, who
also coined the term “fairy tales” to describe her narratives.
If “the frames always locate the telling of the stories in a particular
time and place, implicitly suggesting connections between the twice-told
tales and the particular situation in which they are told”, the fact that the
time and place of the frame story is Restoration France is not accidental:
this was a time marked by the political upheaval which followed the end
of the First Empire under Napoleon in 1814 and the restoration of the
House of Bourbon under Louis XVIII until 1830. In fact, it both enhances
and is enhanced by the Cinderella story through the tension established
between the realistic frame story and the embedded wonder tale which
is, after all, a true story, in that they both depict strong-willed women.
Napoleon would indeed praise the courage of the frame story’s narrator,
the future Madame la Dauphine de France Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, a
daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette: she remained in Bordeaux
despite Napoleon’s orders for her to be arrested when his army arrived,
which led him to remark she was the “only man in her family” (“Marie
Thérèse of France”). If “the embedded tales and the frame that joins them
are always symbiotic, drawing life and sustenance even from their friction”
(Harries 107), it is only befitting that such a brave woman should tell the
story of the Cinderella of the title (although she is never addressed or
referred to as such in the film).
In the frame story of Tenant’s film, which takes place after the
Grimms had published their Kinder und Hausmärchen in 1812 but before
1830, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France (Jeanne Moreau) summons the
Brothers Grimm to set the record straight on a particular wonder tale:
despite claiming she finds their “collection of folk tales quite brilliant
actually”, she confesses she had been quite disturbed when she read their
version of “The Little Cinder Girl”. Assuming that Madame Royale de
France favours Perrault’s version over their own, the Grimms shed some
light on the differences: Jacob (Andy Henderson) argues that “[t]here are
those who swear Perrault’s telling, with its fairy godmother and magic
pumpkins, would be closer to the truth,” whereas Wilhelm (Joerg Stadler)
adds that “[s]ome claim the shoe was made of fur. Others insist it was glass.
Well, I guess we’ll never know.”
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In fact, as Jacob makes clear, the Grimms’ “Cinderella” does not
sport a Fairy Godmother or magic pumpkins; it has instead a little white
bird which grants Cinderella whatever she requests. The bird, which nestled
in a tree planted by the girl on her mother’s grave from the twig of a hazel
bush which her father had given her on her request and had been watered
by Cinderella’s tears three times every day, is a manifestation of her late
mother. As such, it will help the girl by lavishly providing her with the rich
apparel she wears to three different balls where she dances with the Prince.
The Grimms have thus retained Basile’s magic tree whereas Perrault favours
Basile’s fairy as Cinderella’s magical helper instead. Wilhelm’s mention in
Ever After of the glass or fur slipper also illuminates a significant variant
in the Cinderella story:
It was Perrault, in 1697, who first introduced glass into the
Cinderella story. Up to this point the slippers were not glass,
though they could be gold. So the collector of the 345 variants
of the Cinderella story has established. ‘Verre’, glass, was a
mistranslation of ‘vair’, fur.’ But … this was no accident.
‘There is no doubt [Perrault] himself intended that the shoe
should be glass (Armstrong 205).
Thus, Basile’s Cenerentola sports “a slipper that was the most beautiful
and valuable shoe that had ever been seen” (Basile 448), although the
material which it is made of is not specified, whereas d’Aulnoy’s Finette
Cendron wears a slipper “which was made of red velvet and embroidered
with pearls” (D’Aulnoy 465) and the Grimms’ Cinderella’s slipper “was
made of pure gold” (Grimm 471).
Tennant’s Cinderella’s slipper notably combines qualities of its
written counterpart in all the versions except for the Grimms’: it is an
embroidered silver satin slipper profusely decorated with pearls, whose
ornate heel has the sheer translucence of tinted glass. It makes its first
appearance in the frame story: Jacob remarks on a painting portraying a
young woman whose expression remarkably resembles Mona Lisa’s
(because, as the viewer will later learn, it was also painted by Leonardo da
Vinci). Madame Royale then informs him that “[h]er name was Danielle
de Barbarac” (Ever After) while she opens a jewelled casket containing the
slipper. To the utter astonishment of the Grimms, who thus realise that a
true story was turned into a wonder tale, Marie-Thérèse de France then
RE-ENGENDERING “CINDERELLA” ON SCREEN
pronounces it to be Danielle de Barbarac’s glass slipper, and starts narrating
her story with the wonder tale opening formula “Once upon a time”.
Her next words — “there lived a girl who loved her father very
much” — mark the transition from frame story to embedded narrative but
will also retell a core element in three wonder tale versions, Cinderella’s
relationship with her father, quite differently in Tennant’s film. A quick
overview of the written versions will suffice to establish the difference
between the markedly unnatural father/ daughter relationship portrayed
in all the male versions as well as the passive role assumed by the father in
d’Aulnoy’s tale and the way Tennant chooses to visually translate it. Thus,
Basile’s version starts with a prince “who was a widower, and he had a
daughter who was so dear to him that he saw the world through only her
eyes” (Basile 445) only to “let his daughter fall out of his heart” (Basile
446) shortly after he gets married to his daughter’s teacher. This woman
has, unbeknownst to him, tricked Zezolla, the Cinderella of this tale, into
convincing her father to take her as his wife. The ingratitude of both father
and stepmother is such they trample upon Zezolla and favour the new
stepmother’s six daughters instead. In Perrault’s version, Cinderella’s father
is a gentleman “who would have only scolded her since he was totally under
the control of his new wife” (Perrault 450) should she complain of her
stepmother. D’Aulnoy chooses to have a passive, down-on-his-luck king
who is unable to stop his royal spouse from deliberately trying to harm their
three daughters. She thus interestingly twists Basile’s and Perrault’s neglectful
father into a weak father who, although he loves his daughters, is unable
to protect them from their own mother, another significant deflection from
the usual trope of the wicked stepmother. As for the Grimms’, Cinderella’s
father is positively heinous in their version: not only does he favour his
stepdaughters but he also viciously tries to hinder his own daughter from
trying on the slipper by disclaiming Cinderella as his daughter and loading
her with inexistent physical defects. Thus, to the Prince’s question “Don’t
you have any other daughters?” (Grimm 472) this despicable father replies
“No… There’s only Cinderella, my dead wife’s daughter, who’s deformed,
but she can’t possibly be the bride” (Grimm 472).
However, the father who neglects his child from the moment he gets
married to favour his stepdaughters in the male-authored written versions
is metamorphosed, in Tennant’s film, into a loving father before and after
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he is newly married. Unlike the written versions, however, he dies shortly
after his marriage, in a gendered twist of the traditional fate reserved for
mothers in wonder tales: in fact, it is mothers, not fathers, who are either
dead when their child is very young, like Snow White’s or Cinderella’s
mother in the four versions I’m discussing, or else they are rendered totally
helpless to protect their child from harm, like Sleeping Beauty’s mother.
As for the daughter (played by Drew Barrymore in the film), in Tennant’s
film she has also undergone a marked change from the soul of gentleness,
domestic virtue and enduring patience which Perrault and the Grimms
encumbered her with to retain the distinctively active resourcefulness
that characterises both Basile’s Zezolla and d’Aulnoy’s Finette. The first
encounter between Danielle and her father, Auguste (Jeroen Krabbé), is
quite expressive of this double metamorphosis: on arriving home with his
new wife, Baroness Rodmilla de Ghent (Anjelica Houston), and her two
daughters, Marguerite (Megan Dodds) and Jacqueline (Melanie Lynskey),
Auguste tenderly embraces his tomboyish eight-year-old daughter before
he presents her to her new family. Danielle’s clothes are utterly soiled
because she has bested her best friend Gustave in the mud after he
dismissively proffered her to look like a girl in those clothes, but her father
does not mind that in the least: while Auguste laughingly remarks he had
expected to present a little lady but she would have to do, Danielle eagerly
steps forward to meet her new stepmother. Notwithstanding her childish
excitement — “It feels just like Christmas! I get a mother and sisters all in
one day!”, she has delightedly told her servant — the Baroness coldly
surveys her and icily expresses her pleasure in meeting her at last, adding
that “[y]our father speaks of nothing else” (Ever After).
Alas, Danielle’s wish that her stepmother would like her is not to be
fulfilled: besides being too unkempt for the Baroness’s stylish outlook,
Danielle keeps her place in her father’s heart too noticeably for the jealous
stepmother’s liking. As he reminds his daughter when he is putting her to
bed, he is a husband now “but a father first and for ever” (Ever After). Not
only does this scene emphasise that nothing has changed between father
and daughter notwithstanding the new wife but it is also paramount in
revealing a unique feature in this Cinderella: unlike the one in all the written
versions, she is a reader — and not just any reader at that. In fact, she is
actually a very precocious reader of serious literature as the gift her father
RE-ENGENDERING “CINDERELLA” ON SCREEN
brings her — Thomas Moore’s Utopia — makes quite clear. Moreover,
her father’s care in nurturing her mind will bear ample fruit, as Perrault’s
and the Grimms’ patiently domestic Cinderella is metamorphosed into a
noble girl forced into servitude who has a thinking mind of her own, which
she uses to strike out against blatant injustice and to argue finer social
points. I would like to emphasise that this subtle twist in Tennant’s
Cinderella quite remarkably recaptures a recurring trope in d’Aulnoy’s tales:
despite Finette not being a reader, many of d’Aulnoy’s tales glorify female
intellect by upholding the heroines’ reading and writing against their
devotion to domestic chores, much as the conteuses did in the salons. (This
particular trope mirrors d’Aulnoy’s as well as the conteuses’ willingness to
criticise and reform social customs by reclaiming the right to be treated
more consistently as intellectuals by their male peers.) In a dialogue with
Prince Henry (Dougray Scott), Crown Prince of France (on the run from
his court duties including marrying the foreign Princess that his father has
chosen for him so as to further state interests), she quotes from Utopia to
argue a social point: it is the lack of education and poverty which the lower
classes are reduced to by royal decree that makes for criminals who should
thus not be punished as they were driven into it in the first place by those
who mean to punish them.
In fact, it is Danielle’s intellect and passion for books which draw
the Prince’s attention in the first place, rather than her beauty. Later on
in the film, he offers to take her to visit a Franciscan monastery which
boasts a remarkable library and while they peruse the volumes, he confesses
that in all his years of study no tutor ever demonstrated the passion that
she has shown him in just two days. This will even make him announce to
his parents at a later moment in the film that he wishes to found a University where everyone is welcome to learn. The vitality and resourcefulness
Danielle exudes — which cause her stepmother to malevolently remark
those are indeed masculine traits — thus prove irresistible for the Prince
at the same time that expected gender roles are skilfully subverted in this
valiant Cinderella. She evinces her nobility even under rags at the same
time that she refuses the traditional but socially accepted status of the
submissive Cinderella Perrault had created in his 1697 Contes du Temps
Passé. Incidentally, so had Marie-Cathérine d’Aulnoy as well: she forged a
new identity in the tales she told in which metamorphosis equalled magic,
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the creative power to change both her and her heroines’ lives by overcoming
great odds. Therefore, Perrault’s Cinderella, a passive object to another’s
will who waited patiently for her release at the hands of Prince Charming,
did not fit in d’Aulnoy’s definition of femininity since she had nothing to
do with sweet, lachrymose, domestic(ated) heroines, either in her life or
in her tales.
Neither does Danielle fit that description: the Prince is clearly not
used to having a woman knock him down by hitting him with a well-aimed
stone because she has taken him for a common thief, nor is he used to
listening to a woman speak her mind so frankly as to rebuke him. Even
most significant is the fact that the Prince is not used to being saved by a
woman, the way Danielle saves him from a fight with gypsies by outwitting
their leader into carrying with her what she could and then bodily carrying
him for that matter. Other characters who oppose Danielle do not expect
her to overstep the passivity traditionally attributed to women either. Thus,
the wicked stepsister who intended to wear Danielle’s own mother’s ball
gown and slippers for the ball is taken by surprise when she is punched in
the eye (punches being traditionally exchanged by two opposing males in
a fight, whereas women usually use more “feminine” ways of fighting such
as slapping each other’s faces or pulling the hair of their opponent); on the
other hand, the would-be molester whom her stepmother sold her to is
positively dismayed when his own sword is used against him by a very
resolute damsel in not as much distress as he finds himself to be.
This leads me to another trope favoured by d’Aulnoy which is also
portrayed in Tennant’s Ever After, the fact that unhappy lovers will only
be together after they have proved their nobility and tender feelings for
each other through great tribulations, not because their relationship had
been arranged. In fact, herself the victim of an unhappy arranged marriage,
Madame d’Aulnoy was highly critical of forced marriages, so much so that
her tales seriously commented on love, courtship and marriage in the
characteristic witty style of the conteuses. As a matter of fact, Tennant’s film
also expatiates on this point in two occasions: the first is when Baroness
Rodmilla reduces Danielle to the commodity of servant and exchanges her
for all the valuables she has sold to Danielle’s future owner, a lecherous
wealthy older man who has made several innuendoes as to what capacity
he expects to be served in. (This situation, incidentally, somewhat mimics
RE-ENGENDERING “CINDERELLA” ON SCREEN
d’Aulnoy’s own predicament when she was sixteen, as she was abducted from
a convent by a wealthy man thirty years her senior with the connivance of
her own father. Unlike d’Aulnoy, however, who was not able to legally
disengage herself from her husband, Danielle manages to save herself from
the unwanted advances of her master before Prince Henry comes to rescue
her.) The second situation which comments on arranged marriages is when
Prince Henry, out of spite for believing he had been duped by Danielle, is
on the verge of marrying the sobbing Spanish Princess his father had
arranged for him to marry. This princess, who is in love with someone else,
wails while she walks up the aisle and begs him not to marry her. As he
perfectly understands her feelings, he calls off the wedding and leaves the
palace in search of his soul mate, his perfect match in every way, as he
declares Danielle to be. And so the lovers are reunited at last, the Prince
having become a wiser man in the process, and the villains dutifully
punished by becoming servants in their turn. This is quite a Disneyesque
outcome, since it is Disney’s Cinderella (1950) which prefigures this
ending rather than any of the four written versions I have discussed.
The story ends with Madame Royale’s words: “My great-greatgrandmother’s portrait hung in the University up until the revolution. By
then, the truth of the romance had been reduced to a simple fairy tale. And
while Cinderella and her Prince did live happily ever after, the point,
gentlemen, is that they lived” (Ever After). These words, which reveal her
own relationship with Danielle de Barbarac, further emphasise the
dichotomy between wonder tale and true fact which the frame story has
sought to establish from the start. These final words could well be spoken
with regard to Marie-Cathérine d’Aulnoy, the conteuse who wrote wonder
tales — but who, despite not having a happily-ever-after ending of her own
and being now quite forgotten, actually lived.
Works Cited
Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination
1830-1880. Oxford: O.U.P., 2008.
Basile, Giambattista. “The Cat Cinderella”. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition:
From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. Ed. Jack Zipes. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 445-449.
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Bobby, Susan Redington. Fairy Tales Reimagined: Essays on New Retellings.
Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, 2009.
D’Aulnoy, Marie-Cathérine. “Finette Cendron”. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition:
From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. Ed. Jack Zipes. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 454-467.
Grimm, Jacob and Willhelm Grimm. “Cinderella”. The Great Fairy Tale
Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. Ed. Jack
Zipes. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 468-473.
Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the
History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
n/a, “Marie Thérèse of France”, Wikipedia, [Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Marie_Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se_of_France] [Last accessed 24/09/
2012]
Perrault, Charles. “Cinderella; or, The Glass Slipper”. The Great Fairy Tale
Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. Ed. Jack
Zipes. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. 449-454.
Tiffin, Jessica. “Magical Illusion: Fairy-Tale Film”. Marvellous Geometry:
Narrative and Metafiction in Modern Fairy Tale. Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 2009. 179-218.
Warner, Marina, ed. Wonder Tales: Six Stories of Enchantment. London: Vintage,
1996.
Filmography
Disney, Walt. (dir) Cinderella, Walt Disney Animation Studios, running time:
74 minutes, DVD, 1950.
Tennant, Andy. (dir) Ever After: A Cinderella Story, 20th Century Fox, running
time: 121 minutes, DVD, 1998.
RE-ENGENDERING “CINDERELLA” ON SCREEN
Abstract
The enchanted realm of the wonder tale has been gazed upon quite often by
novelists, short-story authors and even poets, who have imaginatively translated
into their creations their own personal wanderings in wonderland. I will thus read
four very different wonder tale versions of “Cinderella”, on a par with Andy
Tennant’s Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998). I will focus on the gendered
differences between wonder tale versions and film, as well as on their distinctive
narrative techniques. I argue that this feminist revision of “Cinderella” re-engenders
identities by being closer to the only version written by a woman author, both in
narrative style and in substance, than to any of the male versions — including the
alleged Grimm tale it follows.
Keywords
Cinderella; Basile; Madame d’Aulnoy; Perrault; Brothers Grimm
Resumo
O reino encantado do conto maravilhoso tem sido muitas vezes contemplado por
romancistas, autores de contos e mesmo poetas, que têm traduzido os seus próprios
passeios pelo mundo encantado nas suas criações artísticas por meio da imaginação.
Irei, deste modo, analisar quatro versões muito diferentes do conto “Cinderela, ou
a Gata Borralheira” a par do filme Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998), co-escrito
e realizado por Tennant. Irei focar a minha análise nas diferenças de género entre as
versões escritas do conto e o filme, bem como nas suas técnicas narrativas distintas.
Defendo que esta revisão feminista do conto “Cinderela” constrói novas identidades sexuais ao aproximar-se mais da única versão escrita por uma mulher, quer
a nível estilístico quer a nível temático, do que a qualquer das versões masculinas
em análise — incluindo o conto dos irmãos Grimm que, alegadamente, segue.
Palavras Chave
Cinderela; Basile; Madame d’Aulnoy; Perrault; Irmãos Grimm
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